Compact physical models for chip and package power and ground distribution networks for gigascale integration (GSI)

Abstract

For the first time, compact physical models are derived in this work that enable quick package- and chip-scale calculations of the power supply noise and incorporate the distributed natures of on-chip power/ground grids and package-level power/ground planes. Designers can use these models to perform chip/package co-design for power distribution networks and tradeoff multiple design considerations such as metal resource allocation on chip and in package, decoupling capacitor insertion and I/O allocation. Such studies can be performed during early stages of design, even when detailed physical design information is not available. The models are used to model a ceramic package designed by IBM, and it is found that there is less than 10% difference between the model predictions and the commercial tool SPEED 2000 when predicting the peak noise value and time of occurrence. The models can have 10x speed-up compared to SPEED 2000. © 2008 IEEE.